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Eunice Lipton is a New Yorker who now lives most of the year in Paris. Born in the Bronx to immigrant Jewish parents, she spent her earliest years in the Catskills where her grandparents made a living renting rooms to Holocaust survivors and their children. Though Lipton’s father came from Latvia, his fantasies riveted on France, a country he’d never actually been to. He deposited these dreams in his daughter. She started going to Paris when she was 19.

Lipton studied history and literature at City College and became a historian of French art. She received her Ph. D. at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. The conflicts between her working-class, immigrant Jewish origins and her elite ambitions and attraction to the world of high art pulled her in unruly and unexpected directions. For example, she wrote about art but focused on labor and women. In Looking Into Degas, it was Degas’s laundresses, milliners and prostitutes that attracted her. In Alias Olympia, she imagined the life of an artist’s model, Victorine Meurent, who astonishingly—and against the grain of the French class system—became a painter herself. This book, a startling mix of fiction, art history and autobiography, received international acclaim and led to numerous television, film and radio appearances.

In her early 40s, Lipton married the artist Ken Aptekar who inspired her to write more and teach less. Soon after, she left a teaching career of twenty-three years, giving up tenure, not to mention a lucrative pension.

Almost behind her back, Lipton began to write about Jews in the Diaspora. She published essays and reviews in The Nation, The Guardian, The Forward, Tikkun, The Women’s Review of Books, and The Art Journal. But for decades she avoided the subject of France and Jews. Until FRENCH SEDUCTION. Then, the emotional and intellectual categories that held Lipton’s life and work in place began to unravel. Her love of France collides with her personal experience of its xenophobia. She wonders why her father told her about the glory but not the hatred. And she tries to figure out why she stays in a country that doesn’t seem to want her. And so begins Eunice Lipton's FRENCH SEDUCTION.